It is no secret that the medical marijuana industry in the United States faces an uphill struggle, indeed our readers will remember that we covered the issue in detail recently and discussed how dependence on cash is putting both medical marijuana businesses as well as consumers at a great deal of risk. It is interesting to note that there have been developments in this field and there is now a payments solution at hand for regulated medical marijuana businesses as well as customers. CanPay has recently announced a solution for the legal marijuana industry that has become available to users as well as businesses in the states of Washington, Oregon and Colorado. If this solution does indeed get adopted en-masse, it promises to solve the industry’s cash-only problem. Why no banking love for marijuana The problem in the United States arises from the dichotomy in laws. While in many states the use of medical marijuana is now allowed, federal law still acts as a spanner in the wheel. The banking industry is thus wary of being on the wrong side of federal law and the industry is largely unorganized. Consumers who want to access medical marijuana in states where it …

Zelle, a money transfer app that is built on a bank-owned payments network to compete with PayPal, Venmo and Square Cash, will be released next year. The app’s network connects 19 U.S. financial firms including the country’s biggest banks such as JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., and Citi. It will enable users to send money via their phones to recipients who will gain access to the funds immediately. Cyber attacks The announcement comes few days after cyber attacks, which occurred on the Internet through common devices like webcams and digital recorders, disrupted PayPal, Twitter, Spotify, some businesses hosted by Amazon Inc and other sites. They are all customers of an infrastructure company in New Hampshire called Dyn, which acts as a switchboard for internet traffic. PayPal said it experienced some service disruptions due to the cyber attack which prevented some of its customers from being able to pay with PayPal in certain regions, though PayPal was not attacked directly. Early Warning The new Zelle person-to-person payment service is expected to rival Venmo, a payments app run by PayPal Holdings Inc. which has become popular with young adults making payments to one another for shared …

Apple recently started to give more freedom to iOS app developers in integrating digital currencies and in-game tokens including bitcoin. Yesterday, the California-based tech giant has approved another bitcoin-based mobile game application called Wheel of Bitcoins, which pays bitcoin directly and immediately to users’ email, from the app. Wheel of Bitcoins is a casual roulette game, with which users spin to win different combinations of bitcoins. Once users earn bitcoins in the game, the app sends it through Xapo directly to users’ emails, allowing users to instantly withdraw or cash out bitcoins. Since the approval of various bitcoin tipping-enabled iOS games and applications such as Game of Birds in June, bitcoin has been increasing its presence in the Apple Store, with 7 bitcoin-enabled games and applications being registered in the store over the past few months. Popular bitcoin-based mobile game developer Bitcoin Alien has had 3 of their applications in the Apple store for over 3 months, after the approval of the Apple team. According to the company, Apple is well aware of the game’s bitcoin payout system and is happy with it. “The team was actually accepting of them, had a few questions but they absolutely know that we …